Quote to Note: Data Pig
June 10, 2010
I don’t use an iPhone. Yes, I pay AT&T for one of my broadband landlines. Yes, I have an AT&T landline. I am not sure if I sympathize with people who make a conscious choice to purchase services which can impose punitive variable pricing. Maybe most people don’t remember the pre-Judge Green days when a person rented a Western Electric telephone device and never owned it? I was at the Piscataway IBM facility when the order was enforced with one part of the building becoming Bellcore and other part remaining Bell Labs. The object of the company was to make money, pay for the fancy stuff like PICS, and build phones you could toss from the second floor of the Western Electric building confident that the clunky thing would work after the 26 foot fall to the concrete below.
Money.
When a telephone carrier with the “old” AT&T DNA offers a deal, I chuckle. I used to put on my Young Pioneers hat, but Tess ate it. Sigh. Memories of a monopoly don’t face quickly.
Point your browser at “AT&T Learns Exactly The Wrong Thing About Data Usage.” Agree or disagree with the write up. What I noted was:
AT&T says that 65% of its users use less 200 megabytes per month; a whopping 98% use less than 2 gigabytes. (NYT) AT&T looked at these numbers and concluded it was time for tiered pricing; time to soak these “data pigs”.
Now that’s a quote to note: “data pigs.” You can take the old AT&T out of the phone business but you can’t alter than DNA easily. Ah, “data pigs”.
Stephen E Arnold, June 10, 2010
Freebie, unlike a long distance call in 1950 when a ringy dingy to Brazil was a major event. Remember differential pricing by class of customer? Ah, remember.
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